Full Crawl

Full Crawl of Content source will re index all the content from beginning

Important Points to Consider:

If new managed property has been introduced, we need to run Full Crawl of content source

If new crawl rules are created/updated/deleted, Full crawl of content source is required

If incremental crawl has been failed

If software update or service pack has been installed on the servers

Expensive in terms of performance issues

Incremental Crawl

Incremental Crawl of Content source will only process those items which are changed since the last crawl happened.

Important Points to Consider:

Most preferred after the full crawl has been done.

Does not hamper the performance as it will crawl only modified documents not the entire content source.

The incremental crawl will retry items and postpone crawling the item if the error persists.

A limitation with the Full Crawl and Incremental Crawl is we cannot schedule both to execute parallel. For example if the Full Crawl is already running then the Incremental Crawl cannot be triggered until the Full Crawl completes, if you try to Stop Full Crawl then also it is mandatory to finish at least once successful Full crawl before triggering any Incremental Crawls.

So Microsoft has come up with the concept of Continuous Crawl

Continuous Crawl

With Continuous Crawl you can maintain the content index as fresh as possible.

More than one continuous crawl can run in parallel

one deep change will not result in degraded freshness on all following changes

The impact of a "Continuous Crawl" is the same as an incremental crawl.

At the parallel execution of crawls, the "Continuous Crawl" within the parameters defined in the "Crawler Impact Rule" which controls the maximum number of requests that can be executed by the server (default 8).

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